No Frame

The book I finished yesterday is titled Strength in What Remains. It's an account of the will and perseverance of a man from Burundi, Africa who survives genocide and civil war. Deo, in a turn of unbelievable events, makes his way to the United States and fights his inner struggle and holds those inner demons and remembrances at bay while learning to function in a foreign world.

Throughout the course of reading the book, I highlighted several passages. Maybe it's in reading words like these, that the feeling of contentment finds me as I realize my life is oh so very good and that I do not know true struggle.  Not even close.  I don't even have a half of a frame of reference.  My life is ridiculously easy.  These words serve as a vivid reminder of that fact...

"He peered out the train windows, at station signs that came and went too quickly for him to study, at blue and yellow lights flashing by in the tunnels, at the reflection of his own frightened-looking face in the glass. He told himself he didn't care if this pointless journey never ended. What seemed like another voice was saying this was a catastrophe, he might be lost forever. Then he began to feel too weary to argue with himself. This weariness was strong. It was like something outside of him, like the clangings and screechings of the train, of the rocking rolling train. 'No one is control of his own life,' he told himself. The thought seemed to comfort him. He dozed off for awhile."

"He imagined the other staff thought he was dim-witted. That was what so many assumed when you didn't speak their language well. So many people, he thought, don't listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make."

"Sometimes Deo would come home from school, thinking, 'I'm learning things my parents don't know.' Sometimes he'd hand a textbook to his mother and ask her to read it, and she would hold it upside down. But she forgave him. She told him once, 'If I can send my children to school, then no one is ever going to tell me that I didn't go to school. If my child went, I am educated, because I have an educated child.'"

"It was easy here to forget how to 'appreciate the moment,' how to 'wait for the right time.' And this applied to the development of people. One shouldn't expect anyone to be complete at any given time. Everyone was 'on a pilgrimage.' She had wanted to understand Deo's and to help him on his way."

"'I have a theory,' she replied. 'I remember thinking long ago, 'We're loved infinitely for however little bit of time we have.' And it's not ultimately tragic to die at any age. Whether we're talking about being blown into little pieces or what is ultimate tragedy, I just think there isn't ultimate tragedy except for evil, and God doesn't will any evil. And we're surrounded by--I tell the little kids about the Good Shepherd, I think it's a great image for them, but the vine and the branches is great, too--but whether we feel it or not, we are surrounded by this tremendously loving presence, and that covers every second of every day. Of everybody.'"

"'Distracting pain with pain,' Deo called this practice. It was common among peasants in Rwanda and Burundi, who had little access to pharmacology but a lot of experience with pain. It was a gruesome and harmful form of palliation, and for Deo it expressed a psychological truth with broad application--that pains exist in layers, with the most excruciating at the top obscuring the pains beneath. So many years of paying attention to the topmost pain of war, he felt, had left many people numb to all the rest." 

"She told an art critic years later, 'I believe it is human to hope to find order and a connection between one's soul and the world outside.'"

"Crossing a sunlit, tiled floor, we passed a sleeping bag, Emmanuel's bed.  'That's how Emmanuel sleeps,' Deo told me.  'I asked him how can he stay here.  He told me, 'This is my home.' And his wife died here and his children, and he's still here.  And he's still here, you know?  I mean, that, as pain goes, that has no word.  And he stays here.'"

The written word, the messiness of language and communication, is a cherished part of my every day.  Reading is my avenue for reflection and when the chicken wings leave me every spring, one of my greatest hopes is that somehow through all of my craziness of reading aloud the parts of Because of Winn Dixie that literally take my breath away while bringing tears to my eyes and all of our questioning, predicting, connecting, inferencing, and thinking while they read real books, that I have instilled in them some sense of the true power of words.  Instead of simply ingesting the letters and the phonics, I want each one of my of my students to truly "get" reading.  And when I meet with my little book clubs every day, one of the first questions out of my mouth is, "So, what did the words make you feel like this time?"

It's amazing what they say back.

I have a saying outside of my classroom that states, "And when you read, she said, 'The world is your oyster.'"  Not an original of mine, but surely a keeper.